Court Rules SCO Must Show Offending Code

SCO has made quite a name for itself in recent months, not because of technical excellence, but because of its attempts to wrangle licensing fees from anyone using Linux, and possibly other *nix variants such as BSD and its descendants. The company has also made a splash because of its lawsuits against those whoive refused to pay, as well as the lawsuit against IBM that launched the bruhaha.

Thus far it has been primarily a battle of words and legal maneuvering: SCOis lawsuit claims that IBM illegally added code that SCO owns to Linux. IBM has steadfastly refuted the claim and has launched countersuit against SCO. As part of those proceedings, IBM has asked the court to force SCO to show the offending code, something SCO has thus far refused to do.

On Friday, Dec. 6, 2003, Judge Dale A Kimball dealt SCO a major blow by ordering SCO to show the code in Linux that it believes violates its intellectual property rights. According to a news report at C|Net, SCO has 30 days to show the violating code. From the C|Net News story, Judge orders SCO to show Linux infringement :

In a hearing in Salt Lake City, Federal Judge Dale A. Kimball required SCO to produce two key batches of information IBM had sought in the case.

In one batch, called Interrogatory No. 12, IBM sought "all source code and other material in Linux...to which plaintiff (SCO) has rights; and the nature of plaintiffis rights." In the second, Interrogatory No. 13, Big Blue sought a detailed description of how SCO believes IBM has infringed SCOis rights and whether SCO ever distributed the source code described in Interrogatory No. 12.

The information IBM sought is at the heart of the case, a bold lawsuit SCO began in March that alleges IBM moved technology from Unix to Linux against the terms of its contract with SCO, violating trade secrets in the process. SCO is seeking $3 billion from Big Blue, and is also trying to compel Linux-using corporations to license SCOis Unix. The judgeis decision is one of the first moves in a case that will affect not just IBM but also other computing giants including Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, SAP and Dell that have embraced Linux.